


I wanna know who you told 'til it's nobody anymore

by swearwollf



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Manipulation, POV Outsider, POV character dies, Possessive Behavior, Protectiveness, inspired by Imperial Radch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:48:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23903371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swearwollf/pseuds/swearwollf
Summary: When Maurice starts his new internship on Helios, he notices a few things odd around the station.
Relationships: Handsome Jack/Rhys (Borderlands)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 156





	I wanna know who you told 'til it's nobody anymore

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks to basia for the meticulous beta and to ivan, ghost, sel, and sasha who looked this over and cheered me on
> 
> maurice was thusly named before i knew about the saurian and i kept it for a dumb joke
> 
> title is from destruction by joywave

The first thing Maurice notices on his first day interning at Hyperion is that Handsome Jack is Capital-E-Everywhere. 

Not just on posters and billboards, although that’s certainly true as well, but Handsome Jack, in the flesh. Maurice sees him three times from a distance as his supervisor leads him and the rest of the new interns around Helios and shows them the sights: once walking down the hallway in front of Datamining, another time waiting impatiently in front of the elevators, and again finally in the Hub of Heroism arguing with a tall man standing in a cafe ostensibly waiting for his coffee. Whatever they’re arguing about seems to involve a lot of hand gestures on Jack’s part but the man with him doesn’t seem bothered, relaxed enough to swat vaguely at the CEO’s hand when he jabs him in the chest with his finger.

“Who’s that with Handsome Jack?” Maurice asks his supervisor. Although Janet has been the picture of austere calm since he met her this morning, she develops a harried air and leads them away from the Hub before they can get their drinks, even though it was her idea to stop for refreshments in the first place. When he looks around at the other employees in earshot inquisitively they all give him quelling stares.

He doesn’t ask again.

The second thing Maurice notices is that no one talks about how Handsome Jack is Everywhere. When he tries to point this out to Janet, she just says, “Handsome Jack is a very busy man.” He mentions it to Terry, the guy in charge of showing him how to use his terminal, and Terry just laughs uncomfortably and makes a joke about how much coffee the man must drink. And the other interns just shrug vaguely.

It reminds him a little of a story his sister told him to scare him as a kid, about a boy walking home at night and seeing the same person cross the street in front of him over and over. The story always ended with the boy catching up to the person as they’re crossing the street, then Annie would pounce on him and tickle him. She never did explain why the person or ghost or whatever was doing that, and he never really understood why the story creeped him out so bad. Until now.

Call it paranoia, but seeing the same person multiple times a day in places where they physically shouldn't be able to be is pretty unsettling. There's probably a law of conservation of something about this? Maurice is no scientist so he couldn't tell you which one, but it stands to reason, right? Plus he’s always in the same clothes as far as Maurice can tell, but sometimes he’ll have blood on him, and then shortly after he won’t.

It’s creepy.

But Maurice doesn’t have that much time to worry about it. This internship is supposed to be his foot in the door for a promising new career and he can’t afford to be caught slacking, but the knowledge lingers in the back of his thoughts constantly. He’s seen enough horror vids to know the only sensible thing to do is pretend it’s not happening and get the fuck out, but Maurice has never exactly been sensible.

This lack of sense is the reason he approaches the man he saw talking to Jack the next time he sees him at the cafe. He hadn’t intended to get anything while he was passing on his way back from his lunch break, but seeing him standing waiting for his coffee, this time alone, is too good an opportunity to pass up. So Maurice orders himself a grande vanilla latte as an excuse and strikes up a conversation.

“Pretty busy for this time of day, huh?” Maurice asks, trying to sound nonchalant and hopefully mostly succeeding. He can’t help but feel like every eye in the cafe turns to look at him as soon as he opens his mouth. It’s probably just nerves. He reaches into his pocket to pull out the pen his advisor gave him, but hesitates and instead just clicks it anxiously. 

The other man doesn’t answer at first, but Maurice stares at him long enough that he startles a little as though only just then realizing he was being spoken to. When he turns to face him fully Maurice is immediately captured by the blue of his ECHOeye. The color takes him back to a family trip to Aquator, to staring over the side of the cruise liner straight into the depths of the ocean. It’s pretty.

“No, I think this is pretty typical for lunchtime?” The guy looks down at Maurice, seeming a little nonplussed. He has probably half a foot on Maurice, so looking down isn’t hard to do but at least he isn’t being a dick about it. He’s also very handsome, with a touch of gray at his temples that his face looks too young for. It’s nice though, makes him look distinguished.

“Really? I’m new here, I guess I wouldn’t really know.” Maurice laughs uncomfortably, feeling his face heat with embarrassment. God, get it together. “Name’s Maurice, nice to meet you.”

Maurice sticks his hand out to shake but the guy is picking up two drinks from the bar and suddenly doesn’t have any hands to shake with. He has a metal arm too, how cool is that?! Maurice’s hand hangs awkwardly in the air before he remembers to drop it.

They stare at each other for a second before the guy remembers himself and replies without much enthusiasm: “Rhys, nice to meet you too.”

“Oh, Rhys!” Maurice can’t stop himself from blurting. “We rhyme!”

Rhys stares at him some more. “What?”

God, Maurice could crawl in a hole and die. His face is probably redder than an error message **.** “Our names, they rhyme.”

To Maurice’s relief, mirth ripples across Rhys’s face. “Oh. I guess that makes you mo’-rhys than I am, huh?” 

The pun shocks Maurice so bad he laughs way louder than is probably appropriate. Rhys grins back, gratified.

“So, Maurice, you’re new? Which department are you working for?” Rhys seems much more relaxed now, even smiling genuinely. 

“I’m interning in Datamining for now, hoping I can come back after I finish my last year of college. Computer engineering.” Oh god, is Maurice managing to have an actual conversation with a beautiful man? He can’t wait to tell his mom about this. Shit, no, Maurice, get back on track. He clicks his pen again.

“Ohh, Datamining!” Rhys positively lights up at the mention of Maurice’s horribly boring internship subject. “That’s where I started off, too! How are you liking it?”

“It’s. Uh-” God, what if Rhys can read minds and he knows Maurice was  _ just _ thinking about how boring Datamining is? He feels himself blushing again but Rhys interrupts him before he can embarrass himself too much.

“It’s completely mind numbing, isn’t it? Yeah, I got out as soon as I could and moved over to Propaganda.”

Propaganda sounds way more exciting than the endless drudgery that’s been his internship. “Really? Are you still in Propaganda?”  _ How do you know Jack _ , he adds mentally.

Rhys does something with his face that’s between a grimace and a smile. “It’s a little hard to explain,” he replies sheepishly.

Before Maurice can ask him any more questions, Rhys startles and looks at a distant point over Maurice’s shoulder. Maurice turns to follow his gaze, but there’s no one there.

“I can get coffee on my own, Jack.” Rhys says to the empty air. “Yes I can. I’m fine, we were just talking, chill out.” A frustrated sigh. “Okay, okay, I’m on my way.” Eyes flicking back to Maurice’s face, he says, “It was really nice talking to you, Maurice. I hope you enjoy your internship.”

And before Maurice can think of anything to say to stall him, Rhys steps around him with both coffees still in hand and strides out into the Hub where he disappears immediately into the crowd.

Maurice stares after him for a long moment, wondering what the hell just happened. Was he talking to  _ the _ Jack somehow, or someone else? Was he even talking to a real person at all?

Before he can think about it too much the barista calls his name loudly, prompting him to get his drink from the bar. Absently, he takes a sip and immediately makes a face. Yep, coffee is still gross. He takes it with him back to the office anyway; the smell is nice and it’s oddly comforting to be holding a warm drink in his hand.

The crawling sensation of being watched follows him for the rest of the day.

\---

Maurice is grateful for the coffee when the day turns out longer than he expected. A large amount of high-priority data is dropped on them two hours before the office closes, forcing everyone, even the interns, to stay hours later than they usually would. Maurice gets released shortly before one in the morning and immediately leaves for his shitty little temporary studio apartment.

At this point he’s so used to seeing Handsome Jack around the station that he doesn’t realize there is no reason for Jack to be on the shitty housing floor he’s renting on until he’s almost right next to him in the hallway. Jack watches him with narrow-eyed intensity as he approaches and Maurice furtively reaches deeper into his pocket, looking for his pen.

Jack smiles like he knows exactly what Maurice is doing. “Got a question for ya, kiddo,” he says.

“How can I help you, sir?” Maurice grips the pen tightly, willing himself not to show his fear. Or at least show a normal amount of fear, not the kind of fear of someone who’s hiding something from Handsome Jack.

Jack steps closer and just his presence feels like an oppressive force bearing down on Maurice. It feels like the closer he gets the larger he grows, like a funky perspective trick in an ECHOvid, until he’s towering over Maurice despite not being  _ that _ much taller than him. Just a few inches, okay, Maurice isn’t  _ that _ short.

“Why’re you sniffing around Rhys, pumpkin?” The menace drips from Jack like venom from a fang. Jack’s hand comes up like he wants to grab the front of Maurice’s shirt, putting him within arm’s reach. Maurice can’t afford to hesitate.

Channeling all his fear into movement, Maurice pulls the pen out of his pocket and stabs at Jack with it. He’s no fighter, though, and Jack jumps out of the way with an easy laugh, like Maurice just did a really stupid trick. But he wasn’t expecting just how clumsy Maurice is. Overextended, Maurice trips over his feet giving him the momentum to stumble into Jack with the pen still in hand. He grazes Jack on the arm, but that’s all it takes.

Maurice hits the ground with a whoomph, landing hard on his wrist with a twist of pain. The pen skitters out of his hand and across the floor of the empty hallway. He flips over on his back, expecting Jack to be on him immediately in retaliation. 

But Jack is just standing there, staring at the little hole in his jacket where the pen went through. He looks down at Maurice, grinning maniacally. “Oh, kiddo. You’re in it now,” he cackles.

“I’m sorry, I just have a lot of college debt!” Maurice wails uselessly. His miserable excuse disintegrates under Jack’s virulent glare.

Swaying a little, Jack turns his hand over to watch a fine tracery of gray spread down the inside of his arm, following the veins. “What the fuck was in that pen?”

“I don’t know, my advisor gave it to me.” Maurice eyes the pen where it lays on the ground like it might grow teeth and bite him. “She said if I could tag you with it I would get a huge scholarship! I mean, I figured it would do something bad but I didn’t think-”

Jack laughs, finally turning his gaze back to Maurice, who abruptly realizes he should have probably run away by now.

“God, you’re so fucking stupid. I can’t wait to strangle you.” Jack stumbles on his way to Maurice, his eyes wild with fury. Frozen in fear, Maurice can’t even try to run, pinned in place on the floor by his horror like a bug for display. 

But on his way to Maurice, Jack collapses. Just falls to the floor like his strings were cut, his upper body nearly landing on Maurice’s legs. Maurice kicks him away with a scream, flipping over and scrambling away on his hands and knees to put some distance between them. He only stops when he realizes that he’s not being followed.

Panting, Maurice pushes himself to his feet and looks behind him. Handsome Jack is completely still. Maurice watches him for a long moment, just to be sure. Jack isn’t even breathing.

He’s not a complete idiot, he knew when his advisor gave him the pen that it wouldn’t do anything good, but after his parents lost all their money in the downfall of Atlas when he was a kid he had no choice but to take out student loans himself. To even think about pursuing a career at any of the big megacorporations he would need a degree, and when he was accepted to a program at a prestigious institution he took it immediately. But with prestige comes a price tag, and just his interest rates were enough to see him living in fear of bankruptcy for the rest of his life. 

So the pen had felt like a lifeline. Even carrying it around Helios looking for a moment to catch Jack alone, it felt full of potential. But now, Jack is dead and Maurice killed him. 

How is he going to get off this station alive? How will he even be able to finish his degree without Hyperion assassins coming to extract their revenge? Fuck, he really didn’t think this through.

Maurice runs to his little studio apartment, leaving Jack’s body in the hallway. He almost anticipates Jack to be gone once he comes out with his hastily packed bag, but the body is still there in an undignified heap in the middle of the hallway and he’s honestly not sure if it’s continued presence makes him feel better or worse. Half expecting Jack to rise and attack like a jump-scare zombie in a horror vid as he passes, Maurice carefully skirts around him before taking off at a hopefully not attention-catching speedwalk.

It doesn’t matter. When Maurice rounds the corner he walks right into another Handsome Jack, bouncing right off him like a bullet off a shield. Luckily, Maurice manages to not fall right on his ass, but he does scream. Loudly.

“Oh my god, shut up!” Jack punches him in the diaphragm, making Maurice crumple over like wet paper before sliding to the ground. Gingerly, Jack rubs at his own ear as though to check it still works. “Holy crap, you scream like a girl. My ears are ringing.”

“You’re dead!” Maurice coughs, rolling over to look back down the hallway at the body but instead finding a pair of legs in the way. Following them upwards reveals a second Jack, holding the body of the third Jack. Or the first Jack?

“Nah,” says the Jack not holding the body.

Maurice whimpers, horrified. Are these body doubles? Did he even get the real Handsome Jack? Was he going to die and leave his parents stuck with his debt? God, he really should have thought this out better.

The Jack holding the body tsks, shaking his head in mocking disappointment. “What exactly were you aiming to do here, pumpkin? Kill Handsome Jack? You thought it would be this easy?”

“I didn’t, I promise, I was gonna get Rhys instead since I saw you guys talking, but then you were here...” Maurice trails off, realizing he’s only digging his own grave deeper. The Jacks both go rigid at the sound of Rhys’s name, their collective stares growing so sharp they could remove Maurice’s head from his shoulders.

“You just can’t stop talking, can you?” the unencumbered Jack tsks, smiling meanly. “I like that in a guy I’m about to torture. Stand up.”

Obediently, Maurice clambers to his feet. His eyes dart about the corridor looking for any kind of exit, but he’s still flanked by two Handsome Jacks and they both are armed with Hyperion pistols and could just shoot him in the back if he tried.

And then one of them slugs him in the face.

\---

Maurice wakes up on the floor, dazed and bleeding heavily from his nose. Someone is going through his pockets so he thinks he’s being mugged at first, but after a bit of talking from the people standing over him that he can’t seem to parse, someone is binding his hands together and picking him up. They aren’t gentle about it, so their shoulder goes directly into Maurice’s diaphragm. He groans in protest.

After that it’s a dizzying walk to god-knows-where while he stares at his assailant’s ass (not flat but not juicy, kinda average) and tries to remember just what the fuck is happening.

Ah. That’s right.

He’s just starting to struggle weakly when a cheerful ding announces their elevator has arrived and moments later Maurice is dumped on the floor like a sack of spare parts.

“Who the hell is this and why are you dragging them up here at one in the morning, Jack,” asks an irritated but familiar voice.

Maurice rolls slowly to his knees and looks up. The room he’s in is huge and honestly pretty ostentatious; he’s kneeling at the foot of a flight of stairs flanked by two gigantic busts of Handsome Jack, looking on at any who dares to approach them in smirking judgement. The stairs themselves lead to a platform holding a single desk, nearly silhouetted against the angry purple light of Elpis. Yet another Jack stands by the desk, one hand on the back of the giant yellow chair parked behind to let him lean forward and speak to the man sitting in it.

The man in the chair is Rhys, the nice guy Maurice had been talking to at the coffee shop. He must have been woken up for this impromptu meeting because he’s in an oversized sweater and his hair is mussed from the precise coif Maurice saw earlier, lying loose around his face. It’s curlier than what Maurice would have expected. 

“Oh. Jack, why are you beating up interns and dropping them in my lap like an overgrown cat with a dead mouse,” Rhys gripes. The elevator door opens again behind Maurice and Rhys visibly recoils at what it reveals.

“Your little buddy here tried to kill me, Rhysie,” the Jack on the platform informs the man next to him. The body of the dead Jack lands beside Maurice with an unappealing  _ whump _ . Now Maurice is being flanked by two Jacks and staring at a third from across the room. How many body doubles does this guy have?

Rhys rubs at his forehead as though to chase away a rising headache. “Really? An intern managed to do that? You’re really slipping in the combat department, Jack, I know you have plenty of bodies but this is still wasteful-”

“Hey! I’m not  _ slipping _ at anything, pumpkin,” the Jack nearest Rhys interrupts, prodding him with one finger. “I was distracted at just the right minute, is all.”

“ _ Distracted? _ ” Sputtering, Rhys bats the proding finger aside irritably. ”Distracted by what? You have more processing power than you know what to do with.”

Jack leans forward with a salacious smirk, speaking lowly but just loud enough for Maurice to hear, “Kitten, you always distract me when you’re naked in my bed-”

“I was! Asleep!” Rhys smacks a palm over Handsome Jack’s grinning face and pushes him away. “Now stop messing around and tell me why you got me out of bed for this.”

Maurice feels like he’s somehow stepped into a completely different universe than his own. The playful familiarity between the two on the platform is bizarre to witness, even though he’s been given a glimpse of it in passing on his first day. He’d had this image in his head of Handsome Jack as a man untouched by any emotion beyond anger or avarice, but they seem to have an easy affection for each other.

Kinda makes Maurice feel guilty about the whole murder plot thing. 

One of the Jack’s standing near him grabs Maurice by the hair and jerks his head up. “Go on,” the Jack sneers with relish, “tell him what you told me, moron. I mean, Maurice.” He definitely meant moron.

“Look, I have a lot of student debt, okay? My advisor said I could get a really sweet scholarship  _ and _ a good position at Maliwan if I just, like. Stabbed Handsome Jack with the pen she gave me.” Rhys is staring at him grimly, like he’s not surprised but still disappointed. “I thought no way I could get close enough to him and not get murdered, but I saw you two bickering in the coffee shop on my first day and I thought you must be close, maybe I could use you to get to Jack.”

Rhys tilts his head curiously, his expression oddly patient. “Why didn’t you just threaten or kidnap me that time we met in the coffee shop?”

“I dunno, you seemed like a nice guy, and-” Maurice winces at how his next words sound, “It was really public there and I didn’t want to get caught, so I kinda chickened out.”

“Did you really expect you would get off Helios alive if you managed to kill either of us, public or no?” Rhys seems vaguely amused at the concept.

Maurice shrugs morosely. His face throbs in time with his heartbeat. “Sorry.”

Rhys shares a long, meaningful look with the Jack closest to him before sighing gustily. “Okay, Jack. Say what you want to say.”

Jack reaches out and caresses Rhys’s face, skimming his thumb under his blue ECHOeye. When he speaks it’s with quiet intensity, like Rhys is breaking his heart. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you, kitten. I know you want to do things on your own, but the one time I leave you alone in months and you end up feet away from someone who wants to kill you. You can’t trust anyone. No one but me.”

Closing his eyes as though in pain, Rhys touches Jack’s hand with his own, delicately, like it might burn him. He seems to fight with himself for a moment before giving in and bowing his head. A look of victory crosses Jack’s expression where Rhys can’t see it, his hand sliding back from the other man’s cheek to the nape of his neck. With his new hold, he pulls Rhys into a loose embrace, hiding Rhys’s face against his stomach.

Hands are on Maurice and before he even has time to shout he’s on his back with a body straddling him, hands wrapped around his throat. Clawing at Jack and kicking at the ground does nothing, Maurice’s struggling only making the man grin down at his victim in manic glee. In his last moments, Maurice casts his gaze to the two men standing on the platform in a silent plea for mercy.

Rhys’s face is still hidden against Jack, hands now clenched in his shirt. But Jack himself is watching Maurice with the same violent appreciation the one killing him does. The last thing Maurice sees is Handsome Jack’s vicious, triumphant smile.

\---

There is something deeply satisfying to Jack in killing someone with one ancillary body while he embraces Rhys with another. Rhys’s hair is silky-soft against his palm, a nice juxtaposition against the last futile struggles of the miserable little intern as the life is crushed out of him. The way Rhys’s hands curl into his shirt as the light in the eyes of the guy whose name Jack has already forgotten begins to fade.

Things had gone well when they first returned to Helios. Jack already knew the station inside and out – he’d created it, after all – and was able to seize total control quickly. The idea of fully integrating with Rhys had been tempting at first, but after some thought it started feeling more like killing Rhys than consolidating with him.

And despite the time he’d spent in Rhys’s head being relatively brief, all things considered, Jack found the idea of being parted from him… unsatisfactory.

So he’d taken over Helios and made Rhys his Co-CEO, as promised. From there it’d been easy work to have some bodies made for himself that looked like him, even if it took a few unwilling test subjects to get the process right. It took a while to clone up some bodies from his own genetic material, but once that got streamlined, it was just a matter of scrubbing them clean and hooking them up with some cybernetics, and BAM, Jack had a dozen bodies to walk around in and threaten people into doing their work correctly.

Life’s been good after that. After being an AI for so long, Jack has gained a new appreciation for being able to actually touch things himself. He’s always been a hands-on kinda guy, and now he has as many hands as he could ever need. 

That, and Rhys is now always within arm’s reach. Any time Jack needs to remind himself that Rhys is there, that he can touch him and actually feel him, he does. The radiant warmth of his skin, the rise and fall of his chest as he sleeps, the sharp edge of his teeth as he bites at Jack’s teasing thumb in his mouth. All there for Jack to experience first-hand.

The arguments had started a few months ago. Jack was too controlling, Rhys had said. He doesn’t need to be babysat at every moment, he can take care of himself and he needs to be able to talk to other people without Jack glaring at them from over his shoulder all the time or wiping every mention of him from the ECHOnet.

Assassination attempts are bothfrequent and ineffectual with how closely Jack monitors all the residents of Helios. The baby ones are even kinda fun to play with, so obvious and scared, an easy source for some quick entertainment. Jack had been playing with this one from the moment he arrived, but then he’d gone and approached his Rhys.

The intern wasn’t supposed to get anywhere near him, but Rhys had slipped out for coffee while Jack’s nearest body was in the shower. Jack had intended to let him have his little rebellion, but then he saw his would-be-assassin via Rhys’s ECHOeye, and with no other body in the immediate vicinity to intercede, he’d felt powerless for the first time in a long time. He’d readied turrets to aerate the intern if he so much as twitched in the wrong way, but his proximity to Rhys made it a risk Jack was unwilling to take.

But Rhys had gotten away mercifully unscathed, leaving Jack with the knowledge he would have to make his point regarding Rhys’s safety concise and definitive.

It had been easy enough to engineer the scene in the hallway. The loss of a body is a sacrifice, but Jack has dozens more waiting for activation to take its place. And now, it seems, Rhys has finally gotten the message.

“You’re okay, Rhysie,” Jack assures, petting his hand through Rhys’s hair as he takes the remains of his now empty body and that of the intern to be incinerated. Leaning down to kiss the crown of Rhys’s head, he promises, “I won’t let anyone take you from me.”

Rhys says nothing, just holds on.

**Author's Note:**

> the working title of this fic was ancillary jackstice


End file.
